iii 



I LIBRARY OF CONGRESS, 



UNITED STATES OF AMEEIOA. 



^kx.o^<^ \- C 



•v-in 



WENDELL PHILLIPS. 



MEMORIAL SERVICES 



UPON THE SEVENTY-FOURTH BIRIIIDAY OF 



WENDELL PHILLIPS, 



HELD AT THE RESIDENCE OF 



WILLIAM SUMNER CROSBY, 



^ No. 517 Broadway, South Boston, Nov. 29TH, 1885. 



pritttcb for priratc iltrculation oitly. 



BOSTON: 

PRINTED BY JAMES COOPER, 

No. 29 Oliver Street. 

MDCCCLXXXVI. 



Ts54 n 



Peace if possible ; 
Justice at any rate. 

Wendell Phillips. 



INCIDENTAL PROCP:i:niNGS. 



On the t-vening of the seventy-fourtli birthday of Wendell 
Phillips, November 29, 1885, a large number of his friends 
assembled in the parlors of William Sumner Crosby, in South 
Boston, to render in reverent love and admiration their homage to 
his character, and to commemorate by memorial services his life- 
long consecration to universal humanity in its extremest needs. 

It was peculiarly fitting that the memorial address should be 
given by Theodore D. Weld — one of the last of the early aboli- 
tionists, r>nd the life-long friend of Wendell Phillijjs. Among the 
hundred guests ])rescnt were — 

Thk Rkv. 15ROOKK IIERFORD. 

Hon. JAMES M. KUP^FUM. 

The Rev. M. J. SAVAGE. 

Mr. henry B. BLAClvWELL. 

Dr. DAVID THAYER I Mr. Phillips's physician). 

Dr. JOHN P. REYNOLDS (Mr. Phillips's nephew). 

Mk. WHXIAM warren (the comedian, who " never missed an oppor- 
tunity in thirty years to hear Mr. Phillips/'). 

The Rev. Fr. CORCORAN. 

The Rev. GEO. H. YOUNG. 

Mr. M. ANAGNOS. 

The Rev. I'ITT DILLINGHAM. 

Mr. JOHN W. HUTCHINSON (the last of the Hutchinson family of 
singers). 

Mr. J. M. W. YERRINGTON (the reporter of Mr. Phillips's speeches). 

Mr. WILLIAM LLOYD GARRISON. 

Mr. a. H. GRIMKfi (Mr. Phillips's eulogist at Tremont Temple, Ajiril 9, 
1884). 

The Rev. EDWARD V. HAYWARD. 

The Rkv. WILLIAM H. SAVARY. 

Mr. E. T. BILLINGS (the portrait artist). 

The Rev. WM. H. LYON. 

Mr. THOMAS HILLS 

Miss ABBY W. MAY. 

Miss ALICE STONE BLACK WELL. 

The Rkv. CHRISTOPHER R. ELIO r. 

The Rkv. C. B. ELDER. 



Mr. Crosby, who presided, opened the exercises by reading the 
twenty-third Psalm from a Bible, a present of Mr. Phillips's mother 
to her son, and given by him to Mrs. Crosby a short time before 
his death. Mr. Crosby also read the twelfth verse of the fifteenth 
chapter o First Corinthians : — 

" Now IF Christ he preached that he rose from 

THE DEAD, HOW SAY SOME AMONG YOU THAT THERE IS 
NO RESURRECTION OF THE DEAD?" 

This Psalm and this verse Mr, Phillips had marked in the Bible, 
and requested that both should be read at his funeral. 

The Broadway Unitarian Choir, in charge of Mr. William R. 
Baker, then sang the twenty-third Psalm, after which the Rev. M. 
J. Savage offered the following prayer : 

Father, we know that no words of ours can adequately name Thee. It is 
Thy might in the infinite universe of which we seem so small a part. We 
are overwhelmed by Thy majesty in the heavens above us, and lost in the 
mystery of Thy presence about us and beneath us. But though Thou art 
manifested as power and might and glory, we believe also that there is that 
in Thee which responds to our trusting hearts when we call Thee "Our 
Father." We do not believe our cry is lost in empty space; but rather that 
all we know as human tenderness and pity ar.d helpfulness and love are only 
finite manifestations of what is infinite in Thee. 

We do not pray because thou needest to be told anything, or because we 
think we can persuade Thee to be kinder than Thou already art. Did we 
dream that our prayers had power to interfere with or alter Thine eternally 
wise and loving purposes we should not dare to pray. We pray because we 
must, pouring out our inmost hearts before Thee, as children think aloud 
their childish hopes and fears in the presence of father or mother. But 
chiefly our prayer is gratitude and trust. 

We thank Thee that man has always been feeling after Thee, though 
sometiines blindly groping, and that thou hast never been far from any one 
of us. Thou didst seek us before we could seek Thee. Forever has it been 
true that Thou hast stood at the door and knocked, ready at the opening of 
the door to come in and abide with us. As fast and as far as we have 
made room for Thee, Thou hast come into the brain as truth, into the heart 
as love, and into the life as noble action. 

And never hast Thou left any age without a witness of Thee, a teacher, a 
leader, an inspiring and uplifting power. Always has some noble one been 
Thy voice, calling men to duty ; always has some seer been Thy light to 
show the way 



And not only in ancient times have Thine inspired ones spoken Thy truth 
to the world. For Thou art the living God — as truly living and leading in 
the grand forward and upward movements of the modern world as at any 
period in the past. Thou hast sent to our time also seers and prophets to 
rouse the people from their indifference, and to lead them in the way of 
righteousness. In our day, as well as in the past, hast Thou sent a voice 
to cry in the wilderness, " Prepare ye the way of the Lord! " In our day, as 
we as in the past, hast thou sent one to undo the heavy burdens, to proclaim 
liberty to the captive, and to break the shackles of them that were bound. 

And to-night we especially thank Thee for him whom we are gathered to 
commemorate; — for his clear eye that saw the truth, for his brave heart 
that did not falter, and for his disturbinf;j voice that would not cry peace so 
long as the people were at rest in the wrong. 

May we prove worthy of the honor we pay to him by being ourselves true 
to the duty that calls to us to-day. May we render him no mere lip-homage; 
but, in his spirit, do the work that this hour needs. So shall we make our 
own lives his fitting monument, and carry on still further the work of human 
deliverance and uplifting to which he devoted his life. 

Thus shall come on earth "the kingdom of God," that is the kingdom 
of a perfected humanity. When that grand consummation is reached, may 
we be fit to join in the paean of victory because we have done some little 
thing at least to help on that victorv. And Thine shall be the honor and 
the glory forever and ever. Amen ! 

At the close of this j^rayer the Choir chanted : 

If I were a voice, a persuasive voice, 

That could travel the wide world through, 

I would fly on the beams of the morning light, 

And speak to men with a gentle might, 

And bid them to be true. 

I would fly, I would fly over land and sea, 

Wherever a human heart might be, 

Telling a tale, or singing a song. 

In praise of the right — in blame of the wrong. 

If I were a voice, a consoling voice, 

I'd fly on the wings of the air; 

The homes of sorrow and guilt I'd seek. 

And calm and truthful words I'd speak, 

To save them from despair. 

I would fly, I would fly o'er the crowded town 

And drop like the happy sunshine down 

Into the hearts of suffering men. 

And teach them to look up again. 



If I were a voice, an immortal voice, 

T would fly the eartii around, 

And wherever man unto error bow'd 

I'd publish in notes both long and loud 

The truth's most joyful sound. 

I would fly, I would fly on the wings of day, 

Proclaiming peace on my world-wide way, 

Bidding the saddened ones rejoice — 

If I were a voice — an immortal voice. 

Mr. Crosby then read letters from friends of Mr. Phillips, 
which will be found at the end of the pamphlet. 

In introducing the speaker of the evening, Mrs. Crosby said : 

" 1 have great pleasure in presenting to you Mr. Theodore D. 
Weld. At the age of eighty-two he comes to speak to us as no 
living man can of Wendell Phillips. Mr. Phillips always spoke of 
him as the most eloquent and impressive of the early anti-slavery 
orators, and cherished for him always the closest friendship and 
most reverential regard. Let us never^ forget how much we owe to 
him and his noble wife, Angelina Grimkd." 

The exercises closed by the Choir singing Rev. M. J. Savage's 
" Ode to Truth" : — 

r. 

No power on earth can sever 

My soul from truth forever - 

In whatever path she wanders, 

I'll follow my commander. 

All hail ! All hail ! beloved Truth ! 

II. 
Whate'er the foe before me. 
Where'er the flag flies o'er me, 
I'll stand and never falter. 
No bribe my faith shall alter. 
Lead on ! Lead on ! thou mighty Truth 

III. 
And when the fight is over, 
Look down upon thy lover, 
He asks, for well-done duty. 
To see thy heav'nly beauty. 
Reveal thy face, celestial Truth 



ADDRESS. 



Lessons from the Life of Wendell Phillips. 



Of all greatness, the greatest is a great soul, great in the divine 
self-forgetting, that lives for others, to cheer, cherish and uplift, to 
help, befriend, bless and save ; lives to right wrongs, to lighten 
burdens, ease pains, assuage ills, and calm passions ; ever serving 
needs and soothing griefs ; glad in others' joy, sharing others' 
woe ; in all doing, daring, and self-sacrifice consecrated to univer- 
sal right, truth, duty, aspiration, and progress. 

Such souls recast the race, illumine and inspire it ; wake up its 
latent life, and launch it into noble action. They marshall its 
array, lead its advance, and beat the time of its movement as it 
marches on. Their voices ring out the glad tidings, that the old 
earth's hoary wrongs pass fast away, and fast the new earth cometh 
wherein dwelleth righteousness. 

They are God's embassadors. His credentials, written out on 
their lives, are His loving despatches to the children of His care. 
Bom with these gifts and graces, they are saviours by birthright, 
commissioned to breathe through all their breath of life, giving 
eyes to the blind, feet to the lame, speech to the dumb, healing to 
the bruised and broken, freedom to the slave, succor to the 
tempted, rescue to the wandering, and to the lost safe guidance 
home to their Father's house. 



8 

They are humanity's pathfinders, exploring its way ; engineers 
drawing its lines and laying its course ; pioneers casting up its 
highway and smoothing the rugged route ; torchbearers, lighting, 
guiding, and cheering it on ; guardian-angels hovering over it by 
day with songs of deliverance, and by night encamping round 
about it in loving watch and ward. 

They open for its thirst fountains in the desert, and minister to 
its hunger that mystic manna, which to the faithful never faileth. 

Such souls are God's apostles to man, buoying him upward by 
the inspiration of their lives, and quickening torpid natures by the 
magnetism of supernal ideas. 

Thus from age to age they have been his pilots through night 
and storm, over raging seas ; pioneers out of Egypt's bondage 
through the wilderness to the promised land. 

Fifty-six years ago, just such a soul, the moral hero of his time, 
bearing God's mandates to this slave-holding nation and church, 
its abject ally, went forth thus commissioned. Alone, God-sent, 
he lifted up his prophecy against a generation of oppressors, dead 
in trespasses and sins. 

Far and long his warning voice rang out, "Repent !" " Break 
every yoke ! " Let the oppressed go free ! " His trumpet-blast 
died in the dull ears of a besotted nation and church. To them 
he seemed as one who mocked. 

At length here and there a kindred soul — a man, a woman — 
caught his inspiration. Those near pressed around him ; those 
afar shouted back their glad all-hail. 

Very slowly their numbers grew. At length, after years of 
stniggle, the charmed circle widened, till thousands wrought exult- 
ing together. 

Then came among them one in earliest manhood, whose fervent 
soul drew him by irrepressible affinities to the leader's side. 



Thenceforth they twain were one. Together with ecjual step they 
marched, leading the van in a moral warfare against infinite odds. 

Divinely they magnified their office. How ihcy wrought, wrote, 
spoke, lived, agonized and conquered ! 

No lips so touched by altar-coals as theirs, no pens like theirs 
flashed truth's electric fires, till, life's last forces spent, they rested 
from their labors ; and in might and multitude their works have 
followed them, till now. from sea to sea, myriads rise up and call 
them blessed. 

Let us for this hour commune with the younger of these anoint- 
ed souls as he traversed his great career. A life wrought out in all 
daring and sacrifice for the poorest of earth's poor, desolate out- 
casts, guiltless victims, the plundered and forsaken of every realm. 

A life so sublime in its devotion to man's intensest needs chal- 
lenges our reverent pondering of the lessons it teaches. 

Twenty-two months ago all of Wendell Phillips that could die 
was borne to Boston's most ancient place of burial. There, at the 
centre of the old puritan city, his majestic form, lowered tenderly 
to its final rest, sleeps with his kindred dust. Yet this lapse of 
time has hardly, if at all, dulled that keen sense of loss borne to us 
upon his latest breath. 

No event, topic, or name lives more vividly to-day in the best 
thought and heart of his native New luiglantl than the memory of 
that grand career. Pulpits, platforms and the press have lavished 
spontaneous homage upon his genius and character. 

From ocean to ocean, cities, villages and hamlets, even the thinly 
peopled frontiers skirting our far West and North, uprose, uncov- 
ered as the wires sped on those drear death-tidings ; while with 
choked utterance those whose hearts his life had won whispered 
brokenly the name they loved. 

Even the late slave-holding South hushed for a while its dis- 



10 

cordant note, while some in New Orleans, Charleston and Rich- 
mond let fall tender words as they read upon their bulletins, 
" Wendell Phillips is dead." 

But it was not his genius alone, and the vast service it had ren- 
dered to man, that kindled this loving admiration. They who out- 
poured those eulogies had felt the thrill of his heart-beat ; its pulses 
had throbbed through them in words that burned. Thus inspired 
they spake. 

What our common speech calls genius is some special faculty 
overshadowing all others and ruling the realm of mind. 

Not such was the genius of Wendell Phillips. It was no king 
over his other powers, but a ruler among rulers, each co-ordinate 
with each in a balanced equality. It was no single element, but 
all the higher elements forming a common unit, equal forces 
blended in an inseparable whole. Some minds are great in a 
single faculty ; others in kindred faculties with mutual affinities ; 
others still in the general range and elevation of all the higher 
powers. 

Such pre-eminently was the genius of Wendell Phillips. Strong 
in each of its elements, ethic, aesthetic, logical, philosophic, criti- 
cal, emotional, imaginative, all these with conscience and indomita- 
ble will were the rounded man himself. The large stature of his 
powers, their exalted level, thus making each a vital constituent of 
his genius, made him in their combination what he was. 

This aggregation ot great mental and moral forces crystallized 
into character, were the grand way-marks which shaped and signal- 
ized his lite-career. 

Some of these stand out so far in Iront that each seems almost 
the man himself. I name first, intuitive insight into rights and 
wrongs, the nature, relations and fitnesses of things. 

Second : An absolute self-poise, never jostled, however rude the 



11 

shock or confounding the (]uandary, whatever friends estranged 
or associations sundered. 

Third : A heroism that nothing could daunt, converting each 
danger into new strength to dare. 

Fourth : A serene independence, standing upon its own footing, 
and content to stand alone. 

Fifth : A fidelity to conviction, never swerving from its line for 
cross, loss, struggle, peril or self-sacrifice, whatever the onset or the 
odds. 

Sixth : A moral courage unmoved by scoff or taunt, threats or 
curses, by faces averted in disgust or scowling in scorn, pale in hate 
or ablaze with rage, while calmly confronting stormy clamor and 
universal ostracism. 

Seventh : All these elements were pioneered by a conscience 
sensitive as quicksilver, true as needle to pole, impelled to univer- 
sal right by an indomitable will, and wrought out in a stringent logic, 
philosophy and rhetoric, compact in tersest phrase, proverb, epi- 
gram, invective, poetic conception and eloquence ; in natural, 
simple speech of common words, and flowing in a style of trans- 
parent strength and beauty. 

To these were added the charm of rare personal attractions, a 
majestic presence, an air of blended grace and dignity, a gentle, 
winning manner, with never a trace of self-display, or hardly of 
self-consciousness, his face alive with soul, his eye serenely benig- 
nant to right, but darting lightnings at incorrigible wTong, his 
speech resonant with those wonderous tones which once heard 
were heard always ; while over all his supremely unselfish life was 
a crown of glory. 

His Boston birth was to him a cherished boon. Speaking of it 
he said, " I love inexpressibly the streets of Boston, over which my 
mother bore up my baby feet, and if God grants me time enough 



12 

I will make them too pure for the footsteps of a slave." \Vhen an 
old man he wrote, " I was born in Boston, and the good name of 
the old town is bound up with every fibre of my heart." Why did 
Boston so nestle in his heart ? Not because it was renowned for 
those splendors which strike the eye, marvels which have made 
famous many cities. In those scores have surpassed Boston. 

It was because the grand old town sat crowned with glorious 
memories, his joy and pride. While life lasted they stirred him 
heart and brain, 

Boston's sublime example in extremest peril, when every portent 
foreboded downfall, in the grapple with England's usurpation, that 
grand defiance lived deathless in his memory, and cast in its own 
mould the plastic boyhood of the young devotee. 

That old heroic mould of revolutionary Boston holds its own 
to-day, and will ever, despite its later degeneracy. True, her per- 
fidy to liberty, Oct. 21st, 1835, trailed across her escutcheon, spot- 
less till then, a stain indelible. Yet jet-black as that stain was and 
will be forever, it can never dim the glory of Boston's revolutionary 
renown. That grand old revolution, its thronging difficulties met 
and mastered, its trials and struggles, burdens and losses, privations , 
hardships and sufferings, intense, long-drawn and heroically borne ; 
its dangers confronted, grappled and defiantly dared ; that im- 
mortal seven-years' struggle, an agony of desperation, crowned 
victor at last, while the land still smoked with slaughter, these 
kindling memories were all household words in the diction of the 
heroic boy. 

That wonderous story his heart had garnered word by word. To 
him it was a living inspiration in all the air. He drew it in with 
his breath and thundered it forth in declamation from the platform 
of Boston's Latin School, as the fiery words of Otis, Quincy, Adams 
and Patrick Henry leaped glowing from his fervid lips. 



13 

But though by birth native to Boston, and counting that nativity 
a precious boon, Wendell Phillips caught in his earliest young 
manhood vivid foregleams of a higher nativity than that according 
to the flesh. This was in due time born of soul-travail in birth- 
throes of the spirit. Pondering the vision and bitiing his time, he 
felt within him new yearnings, his inner eye fast opening, his inner 
ear unsealing, his whole being expanding and exulting in its new- 
found inlets and outlets, giving it freer course, fuller pulses, wider 
scope and higher aspirations. As he mused there came to him 
inklings of a birthright unknown before. Clearer and more clear 
the light shone, till full-orbed at last it rose upon him, revealing his 
life-clientage of earth's plundered millions, poorest of the myriad 
poor, victims foredoomed to disfranchisement from birth, dehu- 
manized by human laws, whelmed under direst wrongs, stripped of 
all rights, robbed of themselves and thus of all besides, the tortured 
victims of all atrocities wrought by man upon man. Forlorn, out- 
casts ! desolate, forsaken, forgotten and left to perish ! 

Thus called of God he counselled not with man. Hailing the 
vision, he bowed to its sacred baptism and felt laid upon him an 
ordaining hand, consecrate with the anointing of a divine apostle- 
ship to bind up the broken-hearted, set at liberty the bruised, 
proclaim deliverance to the captive, the opening of prisons to 
the bond, and to deliver the spoiled out of the hand of the 
oppressor. 

Straightway, strong of heart, he girded his loins, buckled on his 
armor and left all, looking never backward except in joy to shout 
his deliverance. Then exulting in his summons, his mission and 
his message, he sprang to the toils, scorns, perils, alienations, con- 
flicts and hair-breadth escapes of his life-career. 

At this, his first great crisis, let us turn back to note the special 
stages which marked thus far the scenes of his life. 



14 

Born November 29th, 181 1, he graduated at fifteen from the 
Boston Latin School, at nineteen from Harvard College. 

I have recently received letters from two of his classmates, de- 
scribing his college-career. The first is from his roommate, the 
Rev. John Tappan Pierce, of Illinois. 

Mr. Pierce says : " Our acquaintance began at Harvard in i82 7> 
when we first met to be examined. I was then a lad of fifteen, 
but two weeks younger than Phillips. Though I had never seen 
him before, I was drawn to him by irresistible attraction, and I 
always found him true as magnet to steel. I had engaged a room- 
mate, otherwise we should have roomed together the first year ; 
but, just before entering the Sophomore Class in 1828, Phillips 
came to my room and proposed our partnership, which I joyfully 
accepted ; and here began our life-intimacy, a sweet and enduring 
tie. 

" I will speak first of his moral traits. He was not then a profess- 
ing Christian, yet he never said or did anything unbecoming the 
Christian character. What President Kirkland said in his life of 
Fisher Ames was eminently true of Phillips : " He needed not the 
sting of guilt to make him virtuous." His character shone conspic- 
uous. He was above pretence, a sincere, conscientious, devoted 
friend. He had a deep love for all that was true and honorable, 
always detested a mean action. His Bible was always open on the 
centre-table. His character was perfectly transparent ; there were 
no subterfuges, no pretences about him. He was known by all to. 
be just what he seemed. 

" Second, his social traits : He was the favorite of the class. If 
any class-honor was to be conferred, who sp likely to have it as he ? 
Nor would any dispute his claim. Though very modest in his 
self-estimate, every one wiUingly yielded him the palm. Upon the 
death of a valued classmate, Thompson, none but Phillips must 
pronounce the eulogy. 



15 

" Third ; His standing as a scholar was among the first in a large 
class. This is saying not a little when we recall the names of 
Motley, the historian ; Simmons, the distinguished orator ; Eames, 
United States charg^ d'affaires ; McKean, a true son of genius ; the 
Rev. Dr. Morrison, late editor of the " Unitarian Review ;" Mayor 
Shurtleff, and Dr. Shattuck, of Boston ; Pickering, the Boston 
lawyer ; Judge Darrell, of New Orleans ; Joseph Williams, Lieut.- 
Ciovemor of Michigan and president of a state college there. 

" As an orator Phillips took the highest stand of any graduate of 
our day. I never knew him to fail in anything or hesitate in a 
recitation. In mathematics he was facile princeps; natural and 
moral philosophy, history, the ancient languages, in all pre- 
eminent, equally good in all branches. 

" He hated oppression and always defended the defenceless. He 
had great power of reasoning, and easy mastery over those with 
whom he grappled. He was laborious, patient under trials, and of 
a cheerful disposition that could never be discouraged." 

Another of his classmates, the Rev. Dr. Morrison, speaks thus of 
him : " Wendell Phillips in college and Wendell Phillips six years 
after were entirely different men. In college he was the proud 
leader of the aristocracy. From what he then was no one could 
possibly predict what he afterwards became as the defender and 
personal friend of the helpless and desi)ised. There was always 
the same grace and dignity of personal bearing, the same remarka- 
ble power of eloquence, whether in extempore debate or studied 
declamation. It was a great treat to hear him declaim as a college 
exercise. He was always studying remarkable passages, as an 
exercise in composition, and to secure the most expressive forms of 
language, as well as an exercise in elocution, to give to language its 
greatest possible effect. In this he did not accept the aid of 
teachers. His method was his own. 



16 

Before entering college he had been the subject of a religious 
revival. Previous to that he used to give way to violent outbursts 
of temper, and his schoolmates would sometimes amuse themselves 
by deliberately working him up into a passion. But after his con- 
version they could never succeed in getting him out of temper. 

" His classmates would have selected him as one born to be a 
power among men. No other student in those days would com- 
pare with him in that respect. He had already been distinguished 
for his unsullied purity of character. But it was not easy to un- 
derstand how this aristocratic leader of a privileged class could 
cast in his lot with the most despised of his race. The simple and 
true explanation is that a new thought had come in as the central 
motive of his life. His attention was drawn to the great national 
curse and crime of his day, and he gave himself heart and soul to 
the cause. 

" It is not my purpose to justify every word or act of his ; but 
this I would say, that, having known him in the pride of youthful 
ambition and the opening consciousness of great powers, and 
having followed him through fifty years of great events in which he 
took a distinguished part, I cannot doubt that ' in his heart of 
heart ' he was profoundly in earnest, and that the deepest sympa- 
thies of his nature were on the side of those whom the world 
despised. He made mistakes. In the fierceness of the fight he 
sometimes did injustice to those who could not join his standard. 
But his exaggerations were those of one mainly intent on the 
weapons that could be used most effectively in a righteous cause. 
Where he erred the error would be found associated with his intense 
interest in those whom he regarded as peculiarly his clients. He 
was so entirely taken up with the sense of their sufferings and 
wrongs that he could act only as their advocate irrespective of what 
might be due to those who seemed to stand in his way." 



17 

At twenty- two he was through his hiw studies. At twenty-three 
PhilHps was admitted to practice at the bar, and opened his office 
in Boston, where we are told that for three years he waited in vain 
for chents. Mr. Curtis, in his Boston oration, speaks of his sitting 
in his office and jesting about the clients that did not come, and 
also of his sitting there a year later still expectant of clients. 

Mr. Austin, in his life of Wendell Phillips, minute in its personal 
details, gives no intimation that he ever made a speech at the bar 
or had a client. These facts would seem to set the question at 
rest. 

But the sketch of Phillips's life in the last edition of his speeches 
speaks thus of his professional business : " A large and increasing 
practice so occupied his time that he forgot all else. In the trial 
of cases at the bar he was training his eloquence, and before juries 
he was modulating that voice so soon to thrill humanity." 

This conflict in the testimony hitherto available is point-blank ; 
and hero I rest the case, saying only that the preceding extract 
seems in the light of all the counter testimony of half a century 
very like the play of imagination irrespective of facts, rather than 
an authentic sketch of things known. 

Since writing the foregoing I have received from my young kins- 
man, Mr. A. H. Grimke, explicit testimony upon this point from 
Mr. Phillips himself. He has kindly given me the following details : 
"It was at a suffrage festival in Horticultural Hall in 1S78 that 
Wendell Phillips told me the story of a case which he conducted 
when an attorney at the Boston bar. I cannot recall the character 
of the case, nor the incidents as he related them. All I remember, 
and this is vivid, is that the young lawyer had shown unusual skill 
in handling his client's interests, and that the recollection of the 
event was a source of undisguised satisfaction." 

Long after the date of Mr. Grimkt^'s letter, explicit information 



18 

came to me, giving in detail Mr. Phillips's own testimony about his 
legal practice, with the antecedents and corroboratives incident 
thereto. These were sent in a letter written by a lady whose anti- 
slavery enthusiasm at five years old so charmed Mr. Phillips that he 
said to her, " You are my blessed child ;" and ever after the same 
token of affection followed her as she grew to womanhood through 
years of intimacy at his home, till " my blessed child " was garnered 
among his household words. No marvel that, when he felt life's 
close drawing near, he gave her, with other souvenirs, his mother's 
Bible, and that his last words to her in his last hours were, " You 
are a blessed child, remember always that I said it." 

No other except his own wife has received from Mr. Phillips 
such minute details of his life-career. I subjoin the following 
extracts from her letter : 

" Since Mr. Phillips's death, statements have been made in print, 
that he said he had no success as a lawyer. These statements, 
like many others concerning Mr. Phillips, are mistakes. I remem_ 
ber, some two years before his death, calling his attention to an 
article in one of our magazines, written by a person who assumed 
to give the particulars of Mr. Phillips's life in the Essex-street 
house during the forty years he had lived in it. When I asked him 
what he thought of the article, he said, ' It is a well-written article, 
an exceedingly well-written article, when you consider how little the 
man knows about what he is writing. He says that the two most 
distinguished persons ever under my roof were Daniel Webster and 
Edward Everett. Now neither of these gentlemen ever visited me 
and I had no acquaintance with them ; and if viy opinion is worth 
anything, the two persons most famous who ever visited me were 
John Brown and William Lloyd Garrison, and the writer does not 
seem to know that either of these has lived.'" 

" Every one who was intimate with Mr. Phillips, knows, that when 



19 

he was graduated from Harvard College he had but one especial 
end in view, and that was the study of law. During the last fifteen 
years of his life he frequently spoke to me of those early days, and 
all he said is still very fresh in my memory. After leaving college 
he never contemplated being anything but a success in his chosen 
profession. He never thought of giving up his practice until his 
clients left him, qftei- his Famieil Hall speech ; and tlien, but not 
till then, he gave up his office on Court street, and gave himself, 
heart and soul, to the cause of abolition. 

"Wendell Phillips was the favorite child of his mother. By his 
father's early death she had the controlling influence over his edu- 
cation and life-purposes. She was a woman of no mean gifts, had 
great energy and great strength of. character. She early saw the 
great possibilities that lay before her gifted son, and sacrificed much 
that he might have every facility for furthering his professional 
success. Wendell entered fully into the spirit of his mother in his 
resolve, as his diary kept at that time will show, to win eminence as 
a lawyer. He was warranted in expecting much, for Harvard Col- 
lege had given him all her honors. He often spoke to me of his 
practice and the nature of it. ' Very much,' he said, ' was office 
work, drawing up legal papers, wills, &c.' He would say sometimes 
with a smile, he did better then as a young lawyer than young men 
do to-day upon entering the profession. ' Those two years I paid 
all my expenses, and few do it now.' It was only within a year of 
his death that he gave me the sign that had hung over his office 
window, and which he had kept all these years, saying, ' I think 
you will see that it is never destroyed.' 

" Mr Sumner, a short time before his death, speaking to me of 
Mr. Phillips, said, ' When Mr. Phillips became an abolitionist he 
withdrew from the roll of Massachusetts lawyers the name of one 
who would have been amongst her greatest.' He told me also 



20 

that, as young men, law-students together, Phillips and he fre- 
quently discussed the horrors of slavery, and how this country 
could be freed from the curse. ' Little,' said Mr. Sumner, ' did I 
then dream what an active part we were both to take on this great 
question.' " 

Phillips's abolition opinions date back to 1831. These opinions 
were kindled into a burning conviction when in 1835 he saw that 
pro-slavery mob dragging and driving Mr. Garrison bare-headed 
and half-nude through the streets of Boston. To an intimate 
friend he said, " I never could have been anything but an aboli- 
tionist after witnessing that spectacle." 

That the anti-slavery leaven previously kneaded into Phillips's 
conscience was already in ferment is shown thus in Mr. Austin's 
life of Phillips : " When he put his name to the oath to protect the 
United States Constitution that threw a partial protection round the 
master of a slave, he writhed in shame at his weakness." 

This was in 1 834, a year before those barbarians in broadcloth 
gibbeted themselves in infamy along with the municipal authorities 
of Boston on the twenty-first of October, 1835. From that hour 
Phillips's relation to the little band of hunted abolitionists was no 
longer that of mere opinion, but one of intense conviction. 
Thenceforth mind, heart, soul and tongue lived out the faith which 
had been till then hardly more than a speculative creed. 

His first anti-slavery speech was before the Young Men's Anti- 
Slavery Society in Lynn, May, 1837. That speech so took the 
Society by storm that they forthwith engaged him for their Fourth 
of July orator, two months afterward. Those who heard that 
speech insist that the best speeches of his ripened years hardly 
surpassed it. 

Five months later, December 8th, 1837, came that memorable 
scene in Fanueil Hall. There in the old Cradle of Liberty, a great 



21 

birth was bom for freedom's trial-hour. There the frenzy of a 
pro-slavery mob was, for the first time, confronted, and with a sub- 
lime audacity defied and wliclmed in defeat ; an assault as trium- 
phant in its issue as it was daring and resistless in its victorious 
grapple. That victory pioneered to the American platform a power 
unknown to it before, and thenceforth to tread it alone, monarch 
of the realm. 

The immediate occasion of that scene which immortalized anew 
the old Cradle of Liberty, December 8th, 1837, was the series of 
tragedies enacted by pro-slavery mobs in St. Louis, Mo., and Alton, 
111., destroying successively two printing-offices, four presses and 
sets of type, and murdering the editor of the St. Louis " Observer," 
who, despite threats and curses, branded slavery as sin. For this 
mobs hurled to destruction offices, presses, types and editor 
Pierced with five balls he lay in his blood, his murderers scoffing 
over him. While these atrocities were the special occasion of that 
Fanueil-Hall meeting, its logical antecedents, grown then to a mul- 
titude, compelled those who called it to instant action. Public 
sentiment had long threatened vengeance against all anti-slavery 
speaking and writing. These threats were soon flying missiles and 
blows. Abolitionists were virtually oudawed. 

This public sentiment, begotten by the slave-power, was endorsed 
by all the free states. It held sul)jcct Congress and the Covern- 
ment, dominated all political parties and religious denominations, 
all literature, science and art, all general pursuits, industries and 
interests. This subjection was, barring individual exceptions, uni- 
versal, all were overmastered. In the craven spirit of slaves 
they crouclicd at the feet of their masters. This fact stands indel- 
ible on our annals. Those stains, grimed into the escutcheons of 
the states called free, are burning their way down the generations 
compelling our posterity to wear the brand of ancestral infamy 



22 



Do any demur and ask what that infamy was ? Answer : Civiliza- 
tion presupposes a government of law. If law is abolished, society 
sinks into barbarism. Sunk thus was this nation then in its rela- 
tions to abolitionists. Mobs had been for years every\vhere in out- 
burst against them. They were the victims of an indiscriminate 
ostracism, everywhere they were doomed because they hated 
slavery and lived out that hate. Their property, liberties and lives 
lay at the mercy of mobs. In thousands of cases they were sub- 
jected to personal assaults, beatings and buffetings, with nameless 
indignities. They were stoned, clubbed, knocked down and pelted 
with missiles, often with eggs, and, when they could get them, 
spoiled ones. They were smeared with filth, stripped of clothing, 
tarred, feathered, ridden upon rails, their houses sacked, bonfires 
made in the streets of their furniture, garments and bedding, their 
vehicles and harnesses were cut and broken, and their domestic 
animals harried, dashed with hot water, cropped, crippled and 
killed. Among these outrages, besides assaults and breaches of 
the peace, there were sometimes burglaries, robberies, maimings 
and arsons ; abolitionists were driven from their homes into the 
fields and woods, and their houses burned. They were dragged 
and thrust from the halls in which they held their meetings. They 
were often shot at, and sometimes wounded. In one mob a 
number were thus wounded and one killed. Vitriol was thrown 
upon them. Cayenne pepper, assafcetida and other substances 
intolerable to eyes and olfactories were used to disperse their 
meetings. 

For a quarter of a century our civihzation was thus sunk to bar- 
barism. The law, which to others was protection, to abolitionists 
was sheerest mockery. Yea, more, it singled them out as its 
victims. Professing to protect, it gave them up to ravage and 
beckoned the spoilers to their prey. Of the tens of thousands 



23 

who perpetrated such atrocities not one suffered the least lega 
penalty for those astounding violations of law ! 

This is that ancestral infamy of which our ill-fated posterity 
must forever wear the brand. Of the multiform illustrations of our 
civilization sunk thus to savagism, I select the monster crime named 
in the summons to the Fanueil-Hall meeting. Its murdered vic- 
tim was the Rev. Elijah P. Lovejoy, a man of noblest mould. 
Born at Albion, Maine, then Massachusetts, he was graduated at 
Waterville College with its highest honors. Settling in St. Louis, he 
first edited a political paper, and afterward became a preacher, and 
in 1833 was selected by the Presbyterians to edit their paper, the 
St. Louis " Observer." In the fall of '36 a mob tore down its 
printing-office and hurled its press and types into the Mississippi. 
Then the paper was removed to Alton, 111., where during that year 
Mr. Lovejoy had three presses successively broken up and their 
fragments thrown into the river. When the mob rushed to destroy 
the last press, they were summoned by horn-blowing throughout the 
city announcing its arrival. They began by smashing the windows 
of the storehouse which held the press, then set it on fire, shot 
down the editor, and fired upon the abolitionists as they ran from the 
burning building. Mr. Lovejoy had published articles against 
slavery, avowing himself no immediate abolitionist, but a gradual 
emancipationist and colonizationist. These articles stirred the rage 
of slaveholders. Threats came fast. " Lynch him ! " " Tear down 
his office ! " " Pitch his press into the river !" " Drive him out 
of the city ! " are specimens of the street-cries. Public meetings 
denounced him and passed inflammatory resolutions threatening 
vengeance. Upon this Mr. Lovejoy published an appeal to liis 
fellow-citizens. The following extract reveals the man : " I cannot 
surrender my convictions, and so long as life lasts I declare my de- 
termination to maintain this ground. I am ready to suffer and to 



24 

die for these principles. My blood shall flow freely as water rather 
than surrender my right to plead the cause of truth in the face of 
all its opposers. With God I cheerfully rest my cause. I can die at 
my post, but I cannot desert it." 

These pro-slavery mobs were all fresh in the thoughts and fore- 
bodings of those who summoned that Fanueil-Hall meeting. Its 
special object was to express the horror felt at those atrocities in St. 
Louis and Alton, and to brand with infamy the perpetrators and the 
legal authorities, false to their trusts, when law and justice were 
successfully trampled and defied. 

Though those were the special horrors named in the call, yet a 
deeper horror shadowed those who signed that petition. The 
slave-power had long dominated the public sentiment of the free 
states. Finding at length the abolitionists denouncing slavery and 
organizing against it, they had come down upon them in wrath, 
stirring up anarchy and striking down law by spurring on the law- 
less to usurp it, nullify it, and foist into its place the rage of the 
hour. The summoners of that meeting knew that pro-slavery 
mobs, multiplying for years, were then all abroad hunting down 
their victims, trampling every safeguard of property, liberty and 
life. In this universal ravin and ravage, constitutions, bills ol 
rights, civil and penal codes, grand and petit juries, free speech, 
and freedom of the press were all trodden as mire by these 
dehumanized beasts of prey. 

Never in the nation's straits had there come a crisis so momen- 
tous, never had portents, foreboding doom, so thickened and thun- 
dered over the nation as then. 

The foundations were shaken ; Government had a name to live, 
but only in words that scoffed at its shadow. Anarchy rampant 
drove baffled liberty and law before it. The roar of riot and the 
tramp of mobs hurtled in all the air. In its mad onset upon 



25 

personal rights Wendell I'hillips beheld slavery's deadly grapple 
with liberty and law, and high al)ove the clangor of battle heard 
freedom's tocsin ring out its wild alarum. Instant at the rallying 
summons he appears upon the scene. Long before this he had 
learned the folly of gradualism, the inadequacy and falseness of the 
colonization scheme, and the duty and safety of immetliate aboli- 
tion. But no mere opinions can fathom the soul's dejjths. They ~1 
may lie dormant a lifetime. Half dormant Phillips's anti-slavery 
opinions were till he saw slave-holding horrors ablaze in the frenzy 
of pro-slavery mobs. Then his latent anti-slavery beliefs new-born 
became living inspirations. Then only could he " remember those 
in bonds as bound with them." Such thoughts and purposes set 
astir in brain, heart and will soon grew into convictions that flamed 
in speech and act. True they had smouldered long, but when they 
burst ablaze the flame was cjuenchless evermore. 

Before recalling that flame-burst of Phillips's in Fanueil Hall, let 
us trace it from its first kindling until it set all his powers on fire. 
Great moral reforms are all born of soul-travail. Their growth is 
slow and long, when the roots of monster crime are deep-shot and 
strike far out around. Such reforms compel desperate struggles to 
wrench out false principles embedded in public sentiment till pet- 
rified into chronic prejudices, bigotries, superstitions, greeds, 
judges, hates, moral gangrenes and passions, inherited and im- 
memorial, the fossils of ages. 

To do this, all possibilities of mind, soul and spirit must be 
wrought in utmost outlay. To launch a vast radical reform with 
such momentum as shall crown it victor is the sublimest of human 
achievements. What ponderings, wrestlings and spirit-throes in 
those who set it in motion ! W1iat traversings, e.xplorings, siftings, 
testings, analyzings ! What pains in gathering the underlying facts 
with ail they involve ! Then follows that long brooding over 



26 

' details, casting and recastiii^ till plans ripened and souls fired, 
with what might and main the reform is pioneered into being ! The 
starting point and power of every great reform must be the 
reformer's self. He first must set himself apart its sacred devotee, 
baptised into its s}nnt, consecrated to its ser\ace, feeling its pro- 
found necessity, its constraining motives, impelling causes, and all 
reasons why. 

Then his kindled soul will enkindle others, and never till then. 
Such sublime intensities fired William Lloyd Garrison when he 
kneeled, his open Bible before him, and consecrated his life to the 
abolition of slavery. This consecration was absolute and utter. 
Thenceforth that life was never his own. Well might this greatest 
reform of these later ages hail him alone, as it does reverently 
to-day, as its prime originator. Garrison's magnetic contact and 
kindling example inspired in Wendell Phillips that same soul- 
yearning, rapt devotion, heroic daring, unconquerable will and self- 
consecration, which first burst into flames at Fanueil Hall, gilding 
anew the revoiutionary Cradle of Liberty with its old-time glory. 
"To that man," Phillips used to say, " I owe all my anti-slavery inspi- 
ration." Seven years after the starting of the '-Liberator," Phillips's 
abolition reached its furnace heat. This was after he had seen 
Garrison dragged and driven through the streets of Boston by that 
vandal mob in broadcloth, and two years before he sprang into that 
thickest fight in Fanueil Hall, December 8th, 1837, when he faced 
the attorney-general and his mob, rolled back on them their tide of 
battle and whelmed them under it, as the Red Sea buried their 
slave-holding kindred, kith and kin. From October, 1835, to 
December, 1837, Phillips was exploring the slavery question 
throughout : slavery's havoc upon slaves, its reaction- ypon slave- 
holders, the domination of the slave-power over the free states, 
holding them all in its clutch, subject, abject and servile. These 



27 

explorings and ponderings ripened Phillips apace for the work 
awaiting him. As he mused the fire burned ; as he bided his time 
it was gathering that momentum which soon impelled it from con- 
quering to conquer. That power which bore him serene through all 
perils is no mystery. He had studied slavery, knew its nature, ten- 
dencies, effects ; knew that its breath was poison and its touch 
palsy. The spectacle of the Nation strewn with its havoc touched 
his inmost and summoned out his utmost. A supernal passion 
fired him ; a divine magnetism lifted him exultant above all peril, 
loss and sacrifice, till he counted suffering and desperate struggle 
all joy, a glad free-will offering, free as air, to the cause of luunan- 
ity, freedom, and the nation's salvation. 

Just a hundred years to a month, almost to a day, before Phil- 
lips's Fanueil Hall speech, John Wesley, after living two years in 
the midst of slavery in Georgia, shook the dust from his feet 
against it, and sailed from Savannah back to England, crying out 
as he left, " Slavery is the sum of all villainies." The truest, 
tersest, strongest half-dozen words ever tabled against it. Glorious 
old John Wesley had a heart of flesh, //la/ voiced those astounding 
words, " sum of all villainies." Well he knew that language had 
no word that could fitly name the monster. So in despair of nam- 
ing it he could only define it. As he gazed at it no marvel that his 
eyes filled, his sight grew dim, his brain grew dizzy. He listened 
till shrieks stunned him. He pondered the ghastly horror till the 
breath he drew steamed rank with the scent of blood. That same 
"sum of all villainies " Wendell Phillips had now gazed at, listened 
to and pored over till he could gaze and pore no longer. Horrors 
shuddered through his musings, haunted his night-watches and 
peopled his dreams. Then and thus he mastered slavery, traced 
its track as it trailed its pestilent slime over all the free states, sting- 
iDg in its poison through their vital circulation. Silent, secret, 



28 

wide-working, that deadly leaven was everywhere in hot ferment, 
blinding, blunting, besotting, palsying the public mind till it knew 
not itself, only the frenzies of the demons that possessed it. These 
demons gnashed and howled under the Ithurial touch of Garrison 
like their prototypes of old under the exorcism of Jesus. Phillips 
knew that these onslaughts upon liberty and law, only brutal at 
first, had grown murderous ; that the great body of the free North, 
East and West were in their relations to the abolitionists virtually 
demoniac. None but those who saw and heard or were the vic- 
tims of those atrocities can conceive of the blind furor that 
seized all classes, dementalizing and dehumanizing. An insane 
contagion swept through the land like the sirocco of the desert, and 
struck down as if plague-smitten whomever it touched. In every 
free state, men not a few, and women many, uprose unterrified and 
launched their execrations against the cursed thing, denouncing in 
the name of law, civilization and religion those outlaws who had 
trampled all law and shouted all-hail to mobs and murderers. If 
it ever befitted any people in last extremity to cry out, " Compan- 
ions in peril, come to the rescue, lest the things that belong to our 
peace be hidden forever from our eyes," they surely were that 
people ; then was the time and there in the old Cradle of Liberty 
was of all places the place to debate that question, vital to all. 
For sixty years that Cradle which rocked the Revolution in its 
giant infancy had stood still awaiting another epoch to fill it and 
set in motion. 

That epoch had come. The old Cradle was rocking again with 
another birth to Liberty. ^^'iI!iam Ellery Channing, who wrote 
the petition to the mayor and aldermen of Boston, and the one 
hundred who signed it, were the men for the hour and its work. 
The hour had struck ; so had the mayor and aldermen, but the 
note they struck was not liberty's key-note, but slavery's and mob 



29 

law's. Then, as a peace-offering to slave-holders, they denied the 
prayer of the one hundred petitioners, saying that, if granted, it 
might be thought the voice of the city. Ignoble, coward words ! 
\Vell did the sworn custodians of Boston's fair fame brand thus 
their infamy upon their own foreheads. So they barred up the 
door of Fanueil Hall against free speech, liberty and law, and em- 
blazoned thereon the symbols of the city's new heraldry, slavery's 
armorial ensigns, coffle-chains, fetters, whips, gags and branding- 
irons. Immediately Dr. Channing issued the following appeal to 
the citizens of Boston : 

"Has it come to this? Has Boston fallen so low? May not its 
citizens be trusted to come together to express the great principles 
of liberty for which their fathers died ? Are our fellow-citizens to 
be murdered in the act of defending their property and of assum- 
ing the right of free discussion? And is it unsafe in this metropo- 
lis to express abhorrence of the deed ? If such be our degrada- 
tion we ought to know the awful truth, and those among us who 
retain a portion of the spirit of our ancestors should set themselves 
to work to recover their degenerate posterity." 

These trenchant words cut to the quick. No time was lost. In 
a trice placards in capitals flared on the street corners, summoning 
citizens to the Supreme Court room to discuss the reasons of the 
mayor and aldermen for denying the prayer of the one hundred 
citizens. Prompt at the hour the audience came. Discussion had 
free course, the decision was unanimous, A new application was 
decreed, drawn up on the spot and signed by hundreds more and 
sent. Of a sudden new light broke upon the optics of Boston's 
authorities and old Fanueil Hall, rekindling with its ancient mem- 
aries, swung wide open again to the new-born spirit of '76. 

But the story of that meeting cannot be fitly told without first 
describing those scenes that Phillips witnessed two ycirs before 



30 

when he saw the slave power strike dead Boston's government of 
law, and bend under its yoke the necks of her mayor and all her 
city authorities and hold them there subject, abject and servile to 
its bidding, thus ruling out the reign of law and ruling in the reign 
of anarchy and outlawry, brandishing for their sceptres the 
bludgeons of mobs. 

The lessons learned by Phillips then trained him for his achieve- 
ment upon that historic arena which launched his abolition career. 
That education for his life-work calls for a brief notice here. 

Two years before that meeting, Wendell Phillips, from the glowing 
threshhold of his young manhood, looked down upon Boston help- 
less in the clutches of a mob of thousands, its mayor, aldermen 
and police consenting and conniving, while law, justice and civili- 
zation itself lay trodden in the streets. He saw William Lloyd 
Garrison, for words spoken against slavery, pounced upon by a mob, 
driven and dragged half nude through the streets of Boston, while 
anarchy defiant shouted over its barbarian conquest. Thus Phil- 
lips sees his native city lock round her wrists the slave-handcuffs 
and its gyves round her ankles, and receive its iron gag within her 
lips, and clasp with eager hands its coffle-chains as she thrusts her 
bended neck beneath its yoke, and quick at the word take her 
slaves' place in the coffle, fast chained, and as it moves keep step as 
best she may with her fettered feet to the crack of the driver's 
whip. 

He saw that this self-sale of Boston to the slave-power in its 
own shambles was instant death to a government of law, and in- 
stant life to a reign of terror, the chaos of anarchy and blind rage. 
He heard its hurtle in the air, its yells and curses in the streets, and 
the rush of its myriad mob as they tramped along the pave. 

He saw the sign " Anti-slavery Office " dashed to the sidewalk 
and stamped into splinters. He saw the Women's Anti-slavery 



81 

Society in session, the president opening the meeting with prayer. 
Of a sudden Boston's mayor rushes in shouting, " Ladies, go home, 
go home !" 

President : '' Why should we go liome ?" . 

Mayor : " 1 am the mayor. I cannot now explain. Do no 
stop, ladies, go home. Do you wish to sec a scene of blood- 
shed? If not, go home." 

Mrs. Chapman : " Mr. Mayor, your personal friends are the in- 
stigators of this mob." 

Mayor : " I know no personal friends ; I am only an official' 
You must go home. It is dangerous to remain." 

Mrs. Chapman : '' If this is the last bulwark of freedom, we may 
as well die here as anywhere." 

The mob rushed in and filled the room. Failing to find Mr. 
Garrison they burst into another, find, seize, tie a rope around him 
and let him down through a window to the mob outside, who clutch 
their prey, tear off his coat, vest and hat, and drag and push him 
through the streets. " Why don't the mayor call out the troops ?" 
shouted Phillips. "Why does he stand there arguing? Why 
doesn't he call for the gims?" Then recognizing his colonel in the 
crowd looking on, he shouts, " Colonel, why don't you call out our 
regiment ! Offer our sewices to the mayor to rescue this man and 
put down the mob ?" The colonel shouted back, " Phillips, can't 
you see that our regiment are already there in the mob !" The 
mayor, the aldermen, the hundreds of policemen, where are they? 
All there. What doing? Nothing but looking on. " Why don't 
they arrest the mob-leaders," shouts Phillips, "and rescue their 
victim and scatter the mob ?" "Mob! Mob!" shouted indignant 
voices. " Look at them. They are respectable gentlemen of 
property and standing." Just what the j^ajiers said of the mob the 
next morning. 



32 

But let us give the mayor of Boston his due for a chivalrous act 
of patriotic daring. He boldly ordered in open day the arrest ot 
a man as a disturber of the peace and sent him to jail by due pro- 
cess of law, and thus he plucked up by the locks the drowning 
honor of Boston. Who was that notorious outlaw, arrested by the 
mayor and sent to jail for disturbing the peace? His name was 
William Lloyd Garrison. The mob being all respectable law- 
abiding gentlemen of property and standing, every one had, ot 
course, sacredly kept the peace ; andas Garrison was the only one 
who had broken the peace and thus shown himself a rampant mob- 
ocrat it was eminently fit that he alone should suffer the penalty 
and be sent to jail by due process of law, and thus the oppressed 
city breathe free again. The plague was stayed, and the heroic 
mayor was immortalized. Thus the majesty of law was magnified 
and the honor of Boston's honorable authorities kept free from 
stain. But enough ! Wendell Phillips had his lesson now and 
conned it well. 

He traced the lineal descent of that Boston mob direct from 
another mob two hundred years before, which first mobbed down 
black men and women into slaves, and then their posterity as fast as 
born • and with it thick mingled their own posterity marked by 
every shade from black to dark, from dark to slightest tinge, and so 
from mother to child he traced the onslaughts of this vandal mob 
upon all human rights, until free speech and press, pulpit, platform 
and pew, Congress, legislature, the army and navy, the bench and 
bar, colleges, all professions, all hotels, public conveyances and 
places of amusement, he saw these all, all swept under the iron in- 
terdict and duress of an overmastering public sentiment begotten 
by the slave-power and propagating everywhere its kind, A public 
sentiment of threat, gag and padlock, the scorpion's sting and lash, 
the serpent's hiss and fang, taunt, jibe, jeer and scoff, scorn's unmov- 



ing finger pointing, and hate's hot glances shot from flaming eyes. 
Though at this date these mob atrocities of the slave-power had 
not made young Phillips their victim, yet he well knew their name- 
less outrages upon abolitionists, the natural outworkings of the 
principle that sinks men into chattels and strikes down their self- 
right and with it all rights, and blots out the eternal distinction be- 
tween a man and a thing. 

He knew that the system of slaveiy is itself mob-law rampant, 
one class of persons clutching another and robbing them of all 
they have and of themselves to boot ; knew that such a social state 
is sheer oudawry, the blind riot of passion, lust and will, as their 
gusts come and go. Consequently when the city authorities sur- 
rendered their power to a mob they stripped Boston nude before 
the sun and plunged her from civilization into barbarism. 

Phillips traced all this to its source, the all-grasping greed of the 
slave-power, sanctioned by statute and sanctified by the churches, 
baptising it at their fonts, installing it at their altars, and in fraternal 
fellowship giving it cordial welcome to the tables of their com- 
munion. He saw it not only holding overmastered the public sen- 
timent of the free states, but bent upon crushing out all freedom 
of speech and prmt and the last pulse of life in the spirit of liberty 
itself. 

Pro-slavery mobs were ravaging ever}^vhere, pro-slavery public 
sentiment palsying everywhere free speech ; hosts of facts in thick 
array trooping up from every quarter and revealing spectacles in- 
tensifying the crisis. Phillips was now armed, equipped and girded, 
filled full and fired and eager for the summons to the Fanueil-Hall 
meeting. 

The day of the meeting came and with it the audience. Before 
entering upon its events current misconceptions call for correction. 
The common beUef is that Phillips went to the meeting not intend- 



S4 

ing to speak. Mr. Austin, in his life of Phillips, says he had come 
into that meeting only to listen. The sketch of his life in the last 
edition of his speeches says, " Wendell Phillips, who had not 
expected to take part in the meeting, rose in reply." Those of 
Phillips's most intimate anti-slavery friends who still sunave, 
declare that he went intending to speak. That intent he carried 
out in the argument filling seven pages in the volume of his 
speeches. That argument was printed verbatim from notes taken 
as he spoke. Its logic he had thought out, its phraseology was the 
birth of the moment. He spoke wholly without notes. 

That splendid outburst upon the Attorney-General sprang spon- 
taneous at the instant. Further the accounts represent him as 
speaking from the platform of the hall. They mistake. Dr. 
Channing, fearing that if he spoke from that he could not be heard, 
had a lectern placed in front and near the middle of the hall, from 
which he spoke. When Mr. Phillips arose he took that for his 
station. The hour for the meeting came ; those in sympathy with 
its object filled the first floor : earnest, enkindled, determined and 
silent, there they stood. The gallery was packed with a crowd of 
another sort, lawless, turbulent, fierce, bent on riot, and lowering 
malign upon the law-abiding phalanx below. The Honorable 
Jonathan Phillips, a kinsman of young Wendell, presided. 

Brief resolutions drawn by Dr. Channing announced the crisis 
and the momentous interests at stake, and summoned all to rally in 
defense of law, imperilled by lawless hordes. Then came his 
speech, in thought and phrase lull of weight and light. Then fol- 
lowed Mr. Hilliard's incisive address. Then in the front gallery up 
rose a bold-faced man and launched into a violent harangue. His 
whole aspect revealed the bully, truculent, insolent and defiant, his 
face a sneer, his voice a taunt, his whole air threat and swagger, 
as he shouted, " Lovejoy died hke a fool." Then he compared the 



35 

drunken mob that shot him clown to the revolutionary sires, who 
spurned overboard that hated tea taxed by British usurpation. 
Thus glorifying a mob of assassins by likening their atrocities to 
the patriotic exploits of the men of '76, and thus dragging them 
down to the depths of infamy along with bandits and brigands. 
But not content with the infamy which his speech thus far had 
earned, he aspires to the role of a blackguard, and so takes for his 
target the venerable Dr. Channing, insulting him thus : " A clergy- 
man mingling in the debates of a popular assembly is marvellously 
out of his place." Then he compliments the slave-holders by 
using their pet illustration of slaves set free, and likens them to 
wild beasts in a menagerie ; Mr. Lovejoy as their keeper letting 
loose lions, tigers and hyenas upon the people. 

Who was this railing brawler, villifying the revolutionar)- dead by 
herding them with murderers? The Attorney-General of Massa- 
chusetts, the highest legal officer of the Commonwealth. Was this 
a man whom the grand old Bay State delighted to honor ? 

She had sunk thus low. Then it was when liberty, law and 
justice put on sack-cloth, cast dust upon their heads, and sat down 
in ashes wailing forlorn together, for truth had fallen in the streets, 
equity could not enter, justice stood afar off. and judgment was 
turned away backward. 

Profoundly revolving these horrors, Wendell Phillips had come 
up to this great consult in the old Cradle of Liberty. Musing on 
the drear past, brooding over the heaving present, and forecasting 
the portentous future, he could give less heed than he would to 
the wise words of the venerated Channing. But when the brutal 
harangue of the Attorney-General smote his ear, his half-revery 
broke with a crash as he heard Austin's scornful flout of Lovejoy, 
that he " died like a fool," his impious eulogy of his murderers, his 
sacrilegious slander of the revolutionar}' dead. Indignant he 



3G 

exclaimed, " This must be denounced on the spot." " Do it your- 
self," said a friend at his side. As soon as Austin's last brutal 
words dropped, Phillips sprang to the lectern. Then came that 
outburst of eloquence, in tempest, soul of fire, flashing its lighten- 
ings from a tongue of flame. 

" Sir, when I heard principles laid down that place the murderers 
of Alton side by side with Otis and Hancock, with Quincy and 
Adams, I thought those pictured lips would have broken into voice 
to rebuke that recreant American, the slanderer of the dead. Sir, 
for the sentiment he has uttered on soil consecrated by the prayers 
of Puritans and the blood of patriots the earth should have 
ya^vned and swallowed him up 1" Then from the mob in the 
gallery burst howls of rage, and down plunged an avalanche of 
yells and curses. Babel clanged jargon, and bedlam broke loose, 
drowning all speech. At last these mob-yells came clanging 
through the din, " Take that back, take that back ; make him take 
back that word recreant. He shan't go on till he has taken that 
back." 

At length mob-throats grew hoarse, and Phillips began : '•' I will 
not take back my words. Surely the Attorney-General needs not 
the aid of your hisses against one so young as I am." 

When Phillips's volcanic outburst had blown the Attorney-General 
out of sight he began to dissect his argument. He showed that it 
was neither law nor logic, had neither premise nor conclusion, was 
a sheer inflammatory harangue to infuriate the mob he led. 

At the end of Phillips's speech where was that burley swell of 
brag, brass and bluster? At the outset sneering, insolent, defiant, 
he liad burst upon the meeting with the swing and swagger of a 
bravado. In the role of a bully he had blurted insults at his o\vn 
pastor, and with swinish hoofs had trampled the ashes of the 
revolutionary dead. Now at the meeting's close what is left of his 



8Y 

bloated grandiloquence? He had seen his speech hanging all 
slashed into tatters by Phillips's scalpel, and flung for the winds to 
whistle at ; had heard himself arraigned as a culprit, denounced 
and execrated, he had felt dashed against his brazen brow and 
burning into it the brand of infamy as that conquering young arm 
launched the bolt that smote him down. That bolt was symbolized 
in the stone sped to Goliath's forehead by the hand of a stripling 
three thousand years before, when the giant of Gath dashed to 
earth lay headless in the bloody dust. Thus was the Goliath of 
the Bay State bar struck down by another stripling who, though he 
never had a brief, had yet a sling and stone, an unerring aim, and 
an arm that drove the missile home. The bolt flew true, and down 
headlong went the perjured official, perfidious to highest trusts, 
false to liberty, and patron of mobs and murderers, and grand old 
Fanueil Hall rang out in a thousand echoes its loud amen ! Those 
plaudits were to the victim stern prophets of doom. In them he 
heard the tolling of his knell. He had sown the wind, now he 
reaps the whirlwind. Where was he now who had brandished aloft 
his magniloquence in eulogy of mobs and murderers? Where 
and what was he now ? 

Nowhere and nothing. Dazed, stunned, struck dumb, transfixed 
by fork-lightning, sic exit Austin. Thus may all foes of liberty and 
law be made to foam out their shame in face of the noontide sun. 

The arraignment which the Hebrew prophet tabled against his 
nation as she weltered in the pit of her abominations twenty-seven 
hundred years ago was true to the letter of our nation when 
Phillips first woke to life those echoes in Fanueil Hall that had 
slept for sixty years. These are those words of dread shouted by 
the Hebrew prophet in the ears of besotted Israel : 

"A horrible thing is committed in the land. The prophets 
prophesy falsely, and the priests bear rule by their means, and the 



3S 

people love to have it so ; but what will ye do in the end thereof?" 
thundered the old prophet of God. Well may that same dread 
(^estion pierce the deaf ears of our generation to-day. Yea, 
what will ye do in the end thereof? That is the question. What 
will ye do in the end thereof? Does no answer come ? Hark ! 
A burial ground that no eye can span is astir and tossing. Myriad 
graves break up their sods, and from out the heaving ground this 
answer comes : " Here moulder the bones of a million men, but 
not yet, no, not yet cometh the end thereof." 



LETTERS. 

Jamaica Plain, Nov. 21, 1885. 
My Dear Mrs. Crosby. 

I am sorry not to be able to be present and to listen to Mr. Theodore D. 
Weld's paper on the 29th. Whatever he may say will be sure to be interest- 
ing and instructive. Long ago, when I lived in Kentucky, his book on the 
atrocities of slavery made an impression on me which I never forgot. Slav- 
ery, as it existed around me there, was of a mild type, and I did not realize 
what a mass of suffering and cruelty was caused by this poisonous fountain 
of evil. 

Of Wendell Phillips it may be said that few men have so quietly given up 
such fair prospects in life in order to give themselves to an apparently hope- 
less cause. Starting in life with the fairest hopes of success ; sure, through 
his ability, of attaining a high position in society and the state, he sacrificed 
it all, and never seemed to notice what he had done. He thus gave another 
proof that the spirit which actuated the great religious leaders, Francis, 
Benedict, and the Jesuit missionaries, can work as effectually for humanity in 
our day. These saints had their faults — Wendell Phillips had his — but it 
was refreshing in the midst of our commonplace life to find those about us 
who, like Sumner and Garrison and Phillips, could live for an idea. 
Very sincerely yours, 

JAMES FREEMAN CLARK. 
Mus. EiXANOR P. Crosby. 



Boston, Nov. zr, 1885. 
My Dear Madam. 

I thank you very heartily for your'kind note , and if it were possible I should 
rejoice to meet the friends of Wendell Phillips at your house, and to do 
honor to his memory. But on the evening of Nov. 29 I have a service at my 
own church from which I must not be absent. I regret that I cannot meet 
Mr. Weld. 

It is good that our young men should learn to honor one like Wendell 
Phillips, who sacrificed so much of what all men count precious for humanity 
and freedom. It must have been a happy life in the consciousness of earnest 
purpose and the consecration of splendid powers to a worthy end. If your 
gathering can help to impress the power of his example upon a generation 
which saw little if any of the best work of his life, it will do good indeed. 
Yours most sincerely, 

PHILLIPS BROOKS. 
Mrs. W. S. Crosby. 

Boston. Nov. 14, 1SS5. 
Dear Madam. 

If I am in the State on the day of the anniversary of the birth of Wendell 

Phillips, I will do myself the honor to accept your kind invitation to be 

present at your residence, when his life will be brought in remembrance ; and 

I desire to say that nothing will give me greater or more sorrowful pleasure. 

I am very truly yours, 

BENJAMIN F. BUTLER. 
Mrs. W. Sumner Crosby. 



Nov. 22, 1SS5. 
My Dear Mrs. Crosby. 

I am very sorry that I cannot accept your very kind invitation for Nov. 
29. But as that is the date of my father's and my own birthday, we shall be 
celebrating it at home. 

My father's round of pleasures is now such a very small one that I can- 
not lessen it on that occasion by absence, much as I should enjoy paying 
my tribute of respect to dear and honored Wendell Phillips. 

Very truly yours, 

L. M. ALCOTT. 



Cambridge, Nov. 15, 1885. 
Dear Mrs. Crosby. 

I should be glad to join in the celebration of Mr. Phillips's birthday, but 
have a previous engagement that will render it impossible. His name will 
have permanent fame, and his birthday should be remembered. 
Yours very truly, 

T.W. HIGGINSON. 



40 

The Pilot Editorial Rooms, 

Nov, 21, 1885. 
Dear Madam. 

I thank you for your kind invitation, and I deeply regret that I cannot 
accept it. But I am engaged to lecture in Cambridge on that evening. Will 
you be so kind as to let Mr. Weld know how sorry I am that I cannot meet 
him and hear him talk on Wendell Phillips's work. 

It is pleasant and honorable to be remembered in connection with 
Wendell Phillips, and I thank you much, dear Madam, for the association. 
I am very truly yours, 

JOHN BOYLE] O'REILLY. 
Mrs. Eleanor F. Crosby. 



Dear Mrs. Crosby. 

You are very kind to remember me, and ask me to meet the friends of the 
noble man we delight to honor. To hear Mr. Weld is always a great treat, 
but I regret to be obliged to lose that pleasure now. I am going away .... 
and shall not return before Monday. I am sure you will be surrounded 
by a goodly company in the body and out of the body, and I trust it will 
be a memorable and delightful reunion. I know I shall say, " I would I 
had been there," but it cannot be. 

Yours very truly, 

EDNAH D. CHEENEY. 

Letters were also received from 

The Rev. E. Everett Hale, 

Mrs. Samuel E. Sewall, 

Mr. William I. Bowditch, 

Mr. Aaron M. Powell, 

Mrs. Mary A. Livermore, 

Mrs. Julia Ward Howe, 

Hon. John D. Long, 

Mr. Edward M. Davis (of Philadelphia). 



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